People

Vivien Johnson

Sydney writer, researcher, curator and teacher Vivien Johnson’s pioneering books on Western Desert artists and her work on Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights have had considerable social impact. She curated the 2003-5 Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri national touring retrospective and the National Museum of Australia’s Papunya Painting: out of the desert (2007-8) which toured to Sydney and Beijing. Johnson’s Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists won the 2009 Chief Minister’s Northern Territory History Book Award. Once Upon a Time in Papunya (2010) and her most recent book Streets of Papunya: The reinvention of Papunya painting (2015) are published by NewSouth.